Study Claims $41.5 Billion In Portable Game Piracy Losses Over Five Years

Gamasutra reports that Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association conducted a study to estimate the total amount of money lost to piracy on portable game consoles. The figure they arrived at? $41.5 billion from 2004 to 2009. Quoting: "CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009. After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market. CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found."

Comments

Just for comparison

[phantomfive]

Just for comparison, Nintendo has been making around $2billion a year total profit over that period. So either these game companies would have been a lot richer, or these numbers are off.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Moryath]

Considering that an original PSP gets a 33% battery life boost from running a game off of the SD card rather than the craptacular UMD drive? Or the fact that you can carry all 3 of the decent games for the console on one card, and never have to worry about swapping/scratching/losing the UMD's then?

I think you're underestimating #3.

Gotta catch 'em all

[denis-The-menace]

RE: "They just want to pay a reasonable price for a game,..."

When I was a teenager I had friends that had hundreds of games for their Commodore 64.
I ask one of them if they had played all of them.
He told me he barely played any and that he spent most of his computer time copying the games themselves.
That's when I realized that for some, copying games is "The Game". Collecting them, sorting them in alphabetical order, showing them off to your friends, trading with your friends and strangers, talking about the difficulty of copying some games. Nobody would pay for any of this but just "having them" was the thrill. The fact that it was "bad to copy" just adds to it.

In the end it's like pokemon: Gotta catch 'em all.

The companies should worry more about the guys who only copy one or 2 games and play the FSCK out of them. THOSE are the REAL lost sales.